Author: admin

I’ve been thinking recently about provenance. The question of provenance is not a question of whether something is genuine, but rather of whether people know that it is genuine.

Case in point: Some years back I received a gift from an acquaintance of mine who is quite well to do and is very into the history of space travel. He is one of those people who has genuine artifacts from the USSR space program in his house.

The gift was a vial of genuine moon dust. Given who I received it from, I am quite sure it was genuine. Had he held it up in public and said what it was, nobody would have doubted the truth of his statement.

However, the moment he handed it to me, it lost all provenance. It was still the same vial of moon dust, but it was no longer believably a vial of moon dust.

Sure, theoretically I could send it in to NASA for analysis, and they would be able to confirm that it is the genuine article. But who would pay for that, and what exactly would be the point?

So now that vial sits on my shelf, filled with genuine moon dust which has no provenance. But that’s not why I keep it there. It also happens to be filled with something even more precious — genuine sentimental value.

That guy in the White House seems to be considering getting involved in our upcoming NYC Mayor’s race. I can see the appeal for him.

One of the candidates is the incoming mayor, a guy so corrupt that he would likely be in prison by now if he hadn’t made a deal to sell his soul to you-know-who. The other is the former governor, a man who seems to be running only to get past the sordid reason that he was forced from office.

I can see how the guy in the White House would want either of these people as NYC Mayor. After all, each represents an aspect of his own personality. When you sum them together, you end up with his own unique combination of corruption and creepiness.

Meanwhile, their opponent running on the Democratic ticket represents everything he hates: Running on a platform of compassion, standing up for working people, looking out for those New Yorkers who ride the bus every day, for those who work hard to get food on the table for their families, speaking to the openminded multiculturalism that is NY’s great pride and strength.

In short, everything the guy in the White House is trying to destroy. It’s no wonder he wants to get involved.

The silver lining here is that he may actually do it — he be so self-absorbed that he doesn’t realize how deeply he is loathed in NY City. And if he does endorse either of those other two candidates, New Yorkers will respond by voting in Mamdani by a landslide.

When I think of the absurdity of our current reality, my mind often drifts to the 1989 movie sequel Back to the Future Part II. That’s the one where an aged Biff Tannen steals Doc Brown’s time machine to give his younger self a sports almanac that lets him amass a fortune by betting on horse races.

In this alternate reality, Biff grows ever richer and more powerful, and the town itself becomes ever more nightmarish and dystopian, until Marty and Doc show up to undo the damage. It’s sort of like if The Man in the High Castle were about teenagers.

Curious to see how Biff is described on Wikipedia, I came upon this description of the man:

Biff is portrayed as a hulking, belligerent, dim-witted bully who obtains what he wants by intimidating others into doing his work for him, or by cheating.

That, of course, is an eerily accurate description of a certain other well known person in our own reality. Now if only we could find that darned DeLorean and undo the damage…

Many of the current visions for mixed reality glasses position them as a tool for a single user. You have your own private view of digital information, superimposed on the physical world around you, and I have mine.

This mirrors much of our use of smartphones. While you are sitting on the subway looking at something on your phone, the person sitting next to you staring into their phone is probably looking at something completely different.

But there is an opportunity for us to do better. If we establish a convention of symmetrical information — that by default, we are all looking into the same digital enhancement of reality — then we might end up with something more powerful.

Of course, as in the physical world, we might see that digital information from differing points of view. Yet we will all have access to it.

Sure, we can also add asymmetrical information to the mix. You might not want me reading your email, and I probably don’t care about pop-up alerts telling you that your mom called.

But the more we allow symmetric digital information into the mix, the more social will be the experience. Let’s take old fashioned restaurant menus as an example.

When a waiter hands us each our menu, we literally cannot see the contents of each other’s menu. Yet we know that we are all ordering from the same menu.

This is because one important goal of a visit to a restaurant is to have a shared social experience. It’s not a question of technology, but of design — and of the purpose of that design.

I think that we need more social sharing in our future, not less. I hope that as we evolve the technology of smart glasses, our default designs will move into that general direction.

One thing that the COVID pandemic changed fundamentally was the way we meet each other. Before 2020, a meeting was generally understood to be something you did in person, not on-line.

Now that has been flipped. In many industries, people meet on-line via Zoom far more often than they meet in person.

And in a way, that is partially saving us, since our current federal administration is acting much like a second pandemic.

For one thing, the administration is doing everything possible to destroy scientific research in the United States. And by extension, its inane policies are rapidly destroying our nation’s ability to compete in the ever evolving technological space of the global economy.

In many cases, my international graduate students don’t dare to go to leading conferences outside the U.S. these days, because they don’t know whether they will be allowed back in to continue their studies at NYU. But because science has now widely adopted Zoom, those students are still able to participate, although not nearly to the same extent.

Of course they won’t get the same opportunities to meet colleagues in person, to find new professional friends and mentors, and in general to advance their careers and their ability to contribute to scientific progress in the way that one would hope.

But because we had the first pandemic, we now have the tools to limp along until this second pandemic is over.

The United States is going through such a strange period in its history that it may be difficult for future generations to understand how truly bizarre things are right now. To that end, I wonder whether it might be useful to describe our current situation in a way that would be comprehensive to small children.

One traditional way to do this is through nursery rhymes. So here is an attempt to start the process.

You might want to try your hand at it as well. For the children.

Trumpty Dumpty said he’d build a wall,
Then Trumpy Dumpty caused our country to fall.
And all of our women, and all of our men
Could not put our country together again.

After a disappointing jobs report, the U.S. president, in a bold and decisive move, fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the bureau of Labor statistics.

His reasoning was simple: The downturn in the nation’seconomy couldn’t possibly be due to his recent punitive trade policies, so it must have been caused by the commissioner manipulating the numbers.

In related news, it rained in our nation’s capital, and the president got wet. In a bold and decisive move, he fired the weatherman.

In other news, an apple fell from a tree. Due to gravity, it hit the president on the head. In a bold and decisive move, he fired Sir Isaac Newton.

That guy in the White House must be very confused by his recent encounters with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil. The general modus operandi of our current administration is to act like a child throwing a tantrum, as a way of getting everyone else to operate on that level as well.

But Lula insists on continuing to act like a grownup. He’s used to dealing with corrupt autocrats, after having dealt with them for many decades.

So the Brazilian president responds by behaving like an adult, speaking firmly but with respect, and not giving in to bullying and grandstanding. It all must be so confusing to his North American counterpart.

The 50% tariff imposed on Brazil is the political equivalent of a five year old sticking out their tongue and going “Nyah nyah”. It’s not much of a threat when the target of your threats has the option of simply shifting their business to more reasonable trading partners.

When this all shakes out, Brazil will be just fine. But I’m not sure I can say the same for the U.S.

Here’s a fun number game:

For any U.S. president, collect three numeric digits as follows:

— One digit is the number of letters in their first name.
— One digit is the lowest digit of their birth month.
— One digit is the lowest digit of their birth year.

For example, for Abraham Lincoln, the three digits would be 7, 2 and 9 (for Abraham, February and 1809, respectively).

Now try to form numbers by arranging those digits in different ways. For Lincoln, you get six numbers:

      279, 297, 729, 297, 927, 972

You can do this with any U.S. president. For George Washington, the digits would be 6, 2 and 2. So you only get three numbers:

      226, 262, 622

So some presidents produce six numbers, and others produce three. Yet among the 45 U.S. presidents, only one produces a single number.

But that number might say a lot about that president. Can you figure out what the number is?

One scene in The Mortal Storm stood out to me, because it made me curious. It occurse one evening as the Nazis gather around a large fire to burn books.

The two books that we see them incinerate are by Heinrich Heine and Albert Einstein. Each author was chosen for a specific reason.

I understood immediately why Einstein was chosen. Science, being an objective observer of truth, is the natural enemy of fascists.

For example, it is no coincidence that the current U.S. government is defunding science on a massive scale. Of course that is a direct attack on something that is truly great about America — and a key source of our economic power in the World.

But our current administration doesn’t care about any of that. It thinks more along the North Korean model: Keep your people poor and illiterate, and thereby maintain absolute control of the nation that you have ruined.

But what about Heine? I spent quite a bit of time today reading about him, and I highly recommend that you do the same. A good starting point might be his Wikipedia page.

Among his many other accomplishments, Heine coined the phrase “Where books burn, so do people.” Of course such a man would need to be silenced.